With the New Year at hand, the time feels ripe for a little self-reflection and the establishment of a few resolutions for 2015.

Late last year, I finally made the plunge and decided to go all-in on learning to use an airbrush. While there are several staffers around the office who are consummate airbrush painters, credit must go to our convention coordinator Michael Plummer for convincing me to overcome my “old dog” mentality and learn a new trick. As with any new skill, it’s overcoming that initial hurdle of allowing yourself to be bad at something that puts you on the path to becoming good at it.

Thankfully, twenty years of miniatures gaming has provided me with plenty of models to practice on. While I still have a lot of hours to go before I’ll feel qualified enough to be considered even an intermediate air brusher, I did succeed in completing my first real model, a Stormwall, using a combination of airbrushing for the blue and white and brush work for everything else. If I never use the airbrush for anything but painting white, I’ll still consider it completely worth the cost in both time and equipment.

Resolution 1: Put in at least three hours a week working with the airbrush.

This likely comes as no surprise to anyone, but I love tabletop games. Whether miniatures games, board games, or card games, I can count on one hand the number of times I walked away feeling less happy after playing a game, even a bad game, than I felt when I started. At the end of the day, the game is just a vehicle to bring people together for a common experience. For me, that shared experience is one of the most amazing things you could ever ask for. Tabletop games bring people together in a way few other things can.

Even though I am extremely blessed that my position at Privateer Press allows me to combine this passion with my actual work, looking back on this year I don’t feel like I spent nearly as much time playing games as I have in previous years. There are plenty of reasons for this—from an increasingly busy family life to various other demands on my time—but in the end it all comes down to not setting aside the time to stop and sit down at the table to play.

Resolution 2: Devote more time to playing games. This includes playing a game with my wife or family at minimum one night a week, in addition to organizing a regular gaming activity at least once a month with friends outside my home.

In a previous Insider, I talked a bit about my two sons, the oldest of whom is rapidly gaining a strong interest in tabletop games. In addition to his growing fascination with board games, in the last couple of weeks he has become aware of my painting table to the point that he has been asking to use my paints to paint his own figures.

Now, I will admit that my painting time is pretty sacred to me, being one of the few ways I can unplug from the daily stressors of the world. And for all my desire to nurture and grow my boy’s interests and passions, I’ve been putting off diving into this with him. Some of my favorite memories from my own childhood, however, are of building scale model WWII airplanes with my dad in his basement workshop—a pastime that directly contributed to the love I would find for tabletop miniatures hobbying years later.

Resolution 3: Find a way to balance my personal painting time with developing my son’s interest in miniatures painting. After all, if he really takes to it, it’d be great to have someone to help work through the piles of miniatures that fill my garage.

So, goodbye, 2014; hello, 2015. I know I, for one, am looking forward to all the awesome you have yet to bring!